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3 Apps That Prove Mobile Games Can Tell Great Stories

Mobile games are typically thought of as casual affairs—pick-up-and-play time-killers that can fill the time before a bus arrives or your number is called at the DMV. Angry Birds isn’t exactly known for its plot.

But a few iPhone and iPad games have shown us something else entirely—phone and tables can be great platforms for interactive storytelling. Here are three of my favorites. And while not all of these games are brand new, all are worth a playthrough .

1) Device 6 $3.99. iPhone, iPad This is one game that simply didn’t last long enough. Instead of whiz-bang graphics, this mind-bending puzzler uses beautiful and clever typography and minimal art to illustrate a story of a young woman who wakes up in a mysterious place at a mysterious time. The less said of this ridiculously meta Lost-like mystery’s plot, the better.

What’s so great about this game is how it actually challenges and sparks players’ imagination. In a Zork-like fashion, most of the action takes place in text—and in player’s brains. The actual puzzles are difficult without being impossible (best to keep a pen and paper nearby to work out some of the clues), and you’ll definitely want to play this with a good pair of headphones—many of the story’s hints are found in errant sound effects that briefly hiss in the background.

2) Broken Age $9.99. iPad This throwback point-and-click adventure comes courtesy of Tim Schafer, the man behind the cult ’90s PC game Grim Fandango. Noteworthy for its origins on Kickstarter(where it raised more than $3 million) and celebrity voices (hello Elijah Wood and Jack Black), it also features a novel gameplay mechanism that allows players to switch between two seemingly unrelated storylines.

Both of the stories play around with (and to some degree, subvert) common fiction tropes. In one, a rebellious girl decides she doesn’t want to sacrifice herself to a village-devouring monster (a plot point taken from King Kong and a dozen other stories over the years). The other follows a spaceship-bound boy who gets bored with his coddled, computer-controlled existence. You can play through each story one at a time, or quickly hop between the two in order to keep gameplay fresh, and perhaps better grasp the stories’ thematic parallels.

At first, the game comes off a childhood fairytale full of whimsy, wonder, and a wallop of surrealism. But things soon get darker, and the brightly lit story explores surprisingly grim and mature themes. It’s also beautifully designed, and a welcome entry into a video game genre that seemed to have peaked two decades prior.

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